1. Technical Field
This disclosure relates generally to uniquely identifying an entity across multiple device, usage, and application domains.
2. Background of the Related Art
Communication networks are increasingly becoming the backbone connecting the social fabric in modern society. The types of network-connected devices that are widely used today vary from desktop personal computers, laptops, mobile phones, tablet devices, Internet-based TV, and the like, and many more Internet-connected devices are being introduced and/or planned. While these devices provide ready access to Internet-based content and applications, it is not always easy to determine an identity of a person or entity associated with the device making the access request. As is well-known, the ability to uniquely identify the device, the user, or the user group (e.g., household), typically is required in many applications, such as advertising and marketing, personalized content or service delivery, fraud detection, tracing Internet crimes, and integrated together user data from different communication channels. In advertising, for example, advertisers and marketers often wish to engage (e.g., target and/or re-target) the same user across different media content (e.g., Web sites, mobile applications, and the like), and to track user interaction and responses as well as campaign effectiveness across all these media channels.
For mobile applications, typically a device identifier, such as a UDID in iOS™ devices, and the Android_ID in Android™ OS devices, is used to identify a device. A major advantage of identifiers of this type is that they are unique to a device, and all the applications to which the device has access theoretically share the same identifier. This same advantage, however, creates privacy and security concerns, and these concerns have discouraged the use of such identifiers for identity purposes. Indeed, in some cases these device identifiers are being made inaccessible to developers. Other unique device identifiers, such as MAC address, IMEI, and ESN, are being proposed as substitutes. These alternatives, suffer from some of the same concerns as those that exist with the UDID, but they are also are difficult to use because there are no clearly-defined ways to access them. Another approach is to the problem uses application-generated identification. These approaches, which are available through initiatives such as openUDID, SecureUDID, and ODIN, overcome many of the deficiencies of the device-specific approach. Nevertheless, because these identifiers are assigned by applications, they are accessible only to the applications that have permission to access them.
Another common limitation of both the device-specific and application-generated approaches is from the perspective of usage monitoring in that they do not address or solve the problem of identification of an entity that uses different devices (such as a mobile phone and a tablet) to access the same content.
HTTP cookies have long been a de facto standard for identifying unique users on the Web. However, cookie-based techniques suffer from several problems in that they cannot be used easily in non-browser-based applications, which now account for the vast majority of mobile applications. Further, cookies are device and browser-specific; two browsers (or distinct browser instances) on the same device receive two different cookies from the same domain. Conversely, different users of the same device and browser receive the same cookie when they visit a particular domain. Further, cookie support in mobile device-based browsers is not stable and, in general, the approach does not work well with mobile applications. Even when cookie support works, different devices are identified by different cookies. Moreover, because cookies are stored on the client, they are subject to blockage and deletion. Further, because of privacy concerns, browsers often implement functions that it makes it increasingly easy to disable and delete them.
For the mobile web, many techniques besides cookies are being tried for device identification. These include, without limitation, packet sniffing, web beacons, HTTP header information, IP addresses, and the like. Those variables alone often are not enough to serve as persistent device identifiers. These approaches may be combined with fingerprint-based device identification methods for fixed network devices, although the results have variable reliability. Browser fingerprints, for example, which work well with the fixed Web, become unreliable when applied to a mobile Web browser because little user and device-level customization are available to serve as distinguishing features. In addition, such information pertains only to the device, as opposed to the user of the device.
These and other deficiencies of the prior art are addressed by this disclosure.